Hebei Bazhou Shengfang Civil Flower Music. A Folklore

The subject of the dissertation is focused on the folk musical associations in Shengfang Town, Bazhou City, Hebei Province, which are located in the middle-sized countryside communities of the central part of Hebei Province and included in the cultural circle of Beijing area. The basic research objects are the grass roots countryside cultural communities connected in different kinds and with different scales. Through synthesized field work of the folk musical associations in the perspectives of history, politics, economics and culture, the dissertation emphasizes on the description and analysis of the musical activities and existing state of the six traditional musical associations. The core content of the research and analysis is about these folk communities distributing evenly over the relatively small regions, which have beliefs in common local gods and are linked with each other through consanguinity and geo-ethnic connections.Based on the strict field work and specific research of the past and present, the dissertation impersonally describes and analyses the specific cultural lives of the members in the associations, their interrelated affairs, the inheriting of musical culture, and the systems and framework of the communities. Through the objective analysis of the folk artists' apprehension of traditional culture, the reflections of the unitary regional culture inevitably suffering conflicts and impacts during the process of the urbanization of countryside, and the descriptions of various existing forms of the original folk musical associations during the process interwoven with continuity and variation, the dissertation strives to present the complete and vivid panorama of the framework and the cultural lives of folk musical associations in ordinary towns of North China, and make interpretations and draw conclusions in the perspectives of ethnomusicology, sociology, anthropology, and folklore.The dissertation is based on the structure of "summarizing-analyzing-summarizing". Beginning with an introduction, chapter one expatiates Shengfang Town's natural, historical, social, and religious backgrounds with the purpose of foreshadowing chapter two theoretically. Chapter two expounds the activities of Shengfang Musical Association in the perspective of the combination of local organizations and power. The discourse of chapter three is more specific. It penetrates into the individual association, and makes case studies of the six musical associations with spot check. It discusses different characteristics and existing states of the associations respectively, and explores each research subject theoretically in the perspectives of musicology and socio-folklore. Chapter four makes a summary of the previous two chapters, and explains the reasons for the decline of the musical associations in the aspects of society, economics and political power. The epilogue mainly expresses further reflections about the subject and the feelings of the research.